Amidst growing fears of a Covid-19 outbreak in its overcrowded prisons, Turkey is mulling over an early release of some 90,000 prisoners — nearly a third of its incarcerated population. The proposed law has appalled Turkish citizens as much as their government’s slow and haphazard response to the pandemic. While it will let 90,000 criminals back on the streets, it won’t extend that amnesty to some 50,000 people held on “terrorism” charges – many of whom are journalists, politicians, rights defenders, and students held as political prisoners. Opposition parties and human rights groups have united in their outrage at the bill’s inherent injustice.
Indeed, in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s relentless crackdown on his critics and opponents, the judicial system has become one of his primary weapons. Police pursue bogus and intrusive investigations, prosecutors issue fanciful indictments, judges frequently disregard due process. The law is used not to bring justice but to oppress and imprison peaceful dissidents. This trend is a key illustration of the breakdown of the rule of law in Turkey – a NATO ally of the United States and until only a decade ago, an advancing democracy.
This is the story of one victim of Turkey’s corrupt judiciary, Osman Kavala, who has been unjustly imprisoned for two and a half years. A businessman and philanthropist, Kavala dedicated much of his life and wealth to promoting liberal democracy through progressive civic initiatives – including art and exhibitions aimed at reconciliation between Turkey’s Muslim-Turkish majority and non-Muslim, non-Turkish minorities. He has never engaged in violence, nor politics. But his peaceful work has made him a nuisance for Erdoğan’s regime, which draws its strength from a polarizing ethno-religious nationalism antithetical to Kavala’s pluralist and democratic vision.
Since Kavala drew Erdoğan’s wrath in 2017, his Kafkaesque journey through Turkey’s legal labyrinth has come to epitomize the fate of so many citizens who have dared to challenge Erdoğan’s authoritarian worldview. This essay attempts to piece together the legal story of Kavala’s persecution by the Turkish state. The aim is to describe as clearly as possible what has been a deliberately opaque, convoluted, and at times incomprehensible saga that sadly has become the norm for those targeted by Erdogan’s judiciary
A baffling arrest
On October 18, 2017, Turkish police took Kavala into custody at the Anti-Terrorism branch of Istanbul’s Security Directorate Headquarters. They said he was detained for questioning for allegedly violating the penal code and threatening national security by
● attempting to overthrow the constitutional order through force and violence (Article 309 of the penal code); and
● attempting to overthrow the government or preventing it from carrying out its duties partially or completely through force and violence (Article 312 of the penal code).
The police accused Kavala of trying to overthrow the constitutional order and the government through two unrelated incidents.
He attempted to topple the government, they argued, by allegedly organizing the mass, nationwide “Gezi Park” protests against Erdoğan in the summer of 2013. Kavala tried to overthrow Turkey’s constitutional order three years later, the police alleged, by supporting a military coup attempt in July 2016. The Turkish government has blamed the coup plot on a religious movement led by cleric Fethullah Gülen, which it designated in May 2016 as the “Fethullahist Terror Organization (FETO).”
These allegations utterly baffled Kavala, not least because the two events in which the police claimed he was involved occurred so long before his detention. In the four and a half years since the Gezi protests, no one had formally accused Kavala of organizing the protests, nor informed him of any investigation into his role. The coup attempt, meanwhile, had taken place a year and a half before, and while Turkish authorities detained some 150,000 people in the subsequent weeks, Kavala, to his knowledge, had not been under any such investigation.
Moreover, the notion that Kavala could have been part of a Gülenist (“FETO”) conspiracy to overthrow the government was on the face of it preposterous. Kavala is a secular Turk with no affiliation to any religious order – particularly one like the Gülen movement that recruits its members mainly from its network of educational institutions, which Kavala did not attend. His liberal political views, meanwhile, clearly contradict the conservative ideas of the Gülen movement.
The accusation that Kavala supported both the Gülen movement and the Gezi movement was outlandish from the outset. The protesters who joined the Gezi demonstrations were diverse, but largely driven by liberal-leaning, pro-democracy groups who are ideologically antithetical to the Gülen movement. In fact, it was an open secret in Turkey that the 2013 protests had largely been crushed by Gülenist members of the police force. Even by the Turkish state’s own logic, how could Kavala be accused of organizing both a coup attempt that was allegedly planned by
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Merve Tahiroglu | Radio Free (2020-04-15T08:10:02+00:00) Locking up dissidents, Turkish style: the saga of Osman Kavala. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/04/15/locking-up-dissidents-turkish-style-the-saga-of-osman-kavala/
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